Edward de Bono
Professor Edward de Bono is the Co-founder of the School of Thinking.
He co-founded The Edward de Bono School of Thinking in New York in 1979 and was co-owner with Michael Hewitt-Gleeson de Saint-Arnaud until he left SOT in 1984.
They also co-authored the first SOT textbook: Learn-To-Think: Coursebook and Instructors’ Manual (1982) ISBN 0884961990.
Edward de Bono’s par excellance work in the development and teaching of lateral thinking for over 30 years is well-recognised worldwide. de Bono’s key concept is that logical, linear and critical thinking has limitations because it is based on argumentation. The traditional critical thinking processes of Plato, Aristotle and Socrates are reductive, designed to eliminate all but the truth. In many of de Bono’s books, he calls for the more important need for creative thinking as a constructive way though that is deliberately designed. In de Bono’s first book, Mechanism of Mind, he wrote of the importance to disrupt the dominant patterns preferred by human brain design to facilitate potential creative abilities. Many of de Bono’s speculative models from that era about how the brain worked were vindicated by later brain research.
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Dr Hewitt-Gleeson writes:
My interest in Professor de Bono’s work began after I had returned from Vietnam ten years earlier in 1969. I was shown one of his first books by an RAAF Education Officer in the Officer’s Mess at Point Cook in Victoria.
We first met in 1972 when he visited Melbourne on his first lecture tour. He was a Professor of Investigative Medicine at Cambridge University. He told me that he had developed a syllabus for ‘teaching thinking as a skill’ and was trying to get it off the ground. I offered to help him and asked him to send me a copy.
Motivated by my experiences in the Vietnam war and inspired by Edward’s CoRT Thinking syllabus I became convinced that ‘teaching people to think for themselves’ was one of the most worthwhile things I could probably ever support and so I committed myself to the long term, ultimate mission of getting ‘thinking’ on the school curriculum. The collaborative work de Bono and I did in building the School of Thinking was described in 1983 by Professor George Gallup as “the most important thing going on in the world”.
I think Edward’s greatest contribution is that written up in his book The Mechanism of Mind (1967) although he became most popularly known for his invention of the term lateral thinking which is now in the Oxford Dictionary.
When Dr de Bono, was Professor of Investigative Medicine at Cambridge in England he was an expert in body systems. In The Mechanism of Mind which he wrote 35 years ago, Edward de Bono builds a model of how the brain, as an organ of the body, is very likely to operate as mind. This model shows how the brain system, by operating along the lines of other body systems like the liver system or lung system can produce a mind, a biological system to process information. By showing how the brain operates as a self-organising, patterning system de Bono saw the need to promote lateral thinking as a compensation mechanism for some of the limitations of the brain/mind patterning system.
••• You can visit Edward de Bono’s authorised website here …
January 18th, 2011 at 9:19 pm
I agree John – its all very well to learn how to think… but then for heaven’s sake think!!!
March 14th, 2009 at 5:10 am
Interesting Great Thinker.